I wasn't planning on posting this until I had finished BM3 but I couldn't help myself. I'm a sucker for constructive feedback and I could really use some for the starter of this new multi-chapter fic. I wish it were possible to label a story as "NJBC" when you select the characters since it's supposed to be focused on them. I labeled it Chuck and Blair since the main storyline focuses on them and depending on how far the story continues Nate and Serena might be featured less.
This story takes place in 2015 and is based on the ending of season four and loosely on some of the filming pics that have been released (no spoilers though). This first chapter is basically a "this has happened" segment meaning the actual action doesn't kick in until chapter two. Still I hope you'll be able to get a feel for what the story will be like and I would very much appreciate any thoughts on the set-up. I hope it isn't a dull read since there's not really any plot in this first installment. This part is also quite text-heavy whereas the other chapters will have far more dialogue.
I've read through this chapter once myself but I should have done so twice since I then changed around some dates… If you find any inconsistencies with the dates please let me know!
Blair's mouth was completely dry and she absentmindedly rubbed her arms as she shivered. She couldn't believe this was happening.
She was back in New York, one of her rare visits. Since she left the city with Louis roughly four years prior she had only made scarce appearances in the city that had once been her home, the city she had never thought she would want to leave. Part of her really longed to move back here but the way things were she couldn't.
She slowly sunk down on the couch, her mind retracing the steps, going back all the way to when she had left with Louis. Everything that had happened since then came back to her and she recognized a number of points where things could have taken different turns, turns that would have kept her safe from ending up where she was now.
It was all so vivid in her memory. Louis' proposal. Her happiness with Chuck at the bar mitzvah. How devastatingly difficult it had been to let go of Chuck. The pregnancy test that had turned out to be positive. The seven weeks she spent agonizing over the knowledge that she was pregnant without knowing who the father was, trying to decide what she should do. The moment she told Louis about her condition and found out that he was barren.
If she lived for a hundred years more she would never forget that conversation. After spending so many weeks trying to figure out what to do she had at last decided that at least Louis needed to know. They were engaged to be married and she could not keep her secret from him much longer. He needed to know she was going to have a baby and he needed to know that he might not be the father. Only it turned out she had spent an hour in front of the mirror practicing how to break that part of the news to him in vain, since he knew the child's paternity as soon as he heard that there was a child. He could not have children, he told her. He had found out a few years back that he fired blanks. While the news on one hand was a relief it also sparked a big problem and a lot of anger in Blair. She was relieved that she didn't have to wonder anymore who the father was. She had a problem in that she was carrying Chuck's child while engaged to another man, another man who so happened to be a prince. She was angry that Louis had known that he couldn't impregnate a woman but he had kept it from her. A detail like that was rather important to know before you made the decision to spend your life with someone.
They had argued. Louis had had a very hard time coming to terms with her being pregnant by someone Louis knew she still loved. He seemed to think that she was further along than she actually was and that the baby had been conceived right before Louis had arrived in New York, thus he was not mad that she had cheated even if he was mad that Blair hadn't said anything sooner. Blair didn't set him straight. She wasn't sure she wanted to keep planning their wedding or if she wanted to get out of it. It was starting to become a media circus and it frightened her to think what would happen if she broke the whole thing off.
Luckily, though surprisingly, they were able to keep the pregnancy a secret for quite some time. Blair was barely showing at all, a fact which disappointed her since once she had come to terms with being pregnant she had looked forward to having a nice, maternal baby bump. Yet she was well into her fifth month before there was anything to even call a bump and on the day she delivered the baby she looked like she was maybe six months along. She had complained to her doctor but he had shrugged it off and told her that some women simply don't get large bumps. Apparently it all depended on how the child was carried. The fact that her baby chose to be discreet bought her time to figure things out but at the same time she knew that the longer she waited the more difficult it would be.
The engagement ended up falling through. Louis could not make peace with the idea of Chuck Bass' child possibly inheriting the throne and Blair could not make peace with the knowledge that Louis had kept his sterility from her. In addition the idea of passing Chuck's child off as Louis' did not sit well with her at all. Finally she and Louis went their separate ways, when Blair was six months pregnant and still able to conceal the bump through clever clothing.
She headed for Paris to avoid the paparazzi that were probably expecting her to arrive in New York. While she sat on the plane she daydreamed of the future she could have with Chuck and the baby. She knew with every fiber in her body that leaving Louis was the right thing to do. This baby belonged to her and Chuck and it was a clear-cut sign that she and Chuck belonged together. She wasn't sure how he would take the news or how she would break it to him but she would find a way. When two people belonged together they would always find a way.
Before she could return to New York she got a phone call from Nate.
"I saw the news about your engagement" he said, barely throwing a 'hello' in there first. "Sorry it didn't work out. You guys moved too fast."
"So it seems" Blair said, stroking the tiny bump on her belly and thinking more of Chuck than of the guy she was on the phone with.
"I'm calling because I wonder what you're going to do next" Nate said frankly. She heard him curse at someone who apparently drove recklessly while he walked through the city and then his attention was back on her. "Blair please tell me you're not planning on trying to give it another shot with Chuck."
The request stunned Blair to silence. She listened for a full minute to the sounds of New York traffic on the other end while trying to think of something to say, or how to react. Nate sounded very disapproving on the phone when he continued.
"If you have any intentions on getting back together with Chuck then as his best friend I must tell you to abandon them. Right now."
"Nate… What… What are you talking about? And why is this any of your business?"
"Things haven't exactly been splendid around here since you left" Nate said. "Letting you go was the hardest thing Chuck has ever done. You don't know what it did to him."
"So why are you objecting to the idea of me and Chuck getting back together?" Blair wondered.
"You made your choice. He was a mess. But he's beginning to move on now."
Blair swallowed, an unpleasant feeling spreading in her chest.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"I find that hard to believe. You know, Emmy's been good for him."
"Emmy?" Blair echoed. Who the hell was Emmy?
"Yeah, Chuck's new girlfriend" Nate pointed out. "Haven't you checked Gossip Girl recently?"
"I'd rather not read what she has to say about my botched engagement."
"For the past couple of weeks Chuck has been seeing this girl Emmy. He was sinking and now he's not anymore. If you knew what a mess he had been you wouldn't do anything to disrupt his life now that he's beginning to pull it together."
"If he was a mess over losing me then the only thing that can pull him together is me" Blair argued.
"Yeah but for how long?" Nate wondered. "How long will it be before you leave him again? He can't go through that again. You shouldn't come back and toy with his emotions now. It would be cruel."
"Toy with his emotions?" Blair echoed in an offended snort.
"The fact is you could have had him, hell you had him on a silver platter, but you chose Louis. Now that things are effed up between you and the prince it's only natural that you'd come looking for the man you gave up. He's my best friend and he can't be your consolation prize. I can't pick up the pieces when he's broken again and I can't watch him go through something like that one more time. "
"Chuck has never been my consolation prize" Blair snarled, feeling the baby kick as if to agree with her and underline her words. "There's something very important that I need to tell Chuck and I don't care what you say."
"You chose Louis" Nate repeated. "You made your choice. Chuck has moved on. It's not okay for you to come and try and beckon him back now. He stepped away and let you try and make things work with Louis without his interfering. You owe him the same courtesy. He's only been with Emmy for a short while, who knows, perhaps it's over tomorrow. But seriously Blair he has the chance to move on and find something new that matters in his life. Even without Emmy I would be hesitant to you coming back to try and make him yours again but as things are now I cannot let you destroy his chances of having a significant relationship with her. It would be cruel Blair."
Blair swallowed and tried to keep the tears away. All she wanted was to tell Chuck about the baby and rebuild their relationship. Just thinking about him with another woman made her heart ache but at the very least she knew she needed to tell Chuck about their child. Though if she was completely truthful she had no doubt that once Chuck knew they were having a baby together he would forget all about any other woman and be hers again.
"Leave Chuck and me to Chuck and me" she told Nate. "There's something important that I need to discuss with him and it is not me telling him how much I still…"
She drifted off. The sound of a large car horn filled her ears and she wished Nate could have called her up when he was inside rather that out in traffic.
"Whatever it is you can tell him over the phone" Nate decided. "I'm serious about this Blair. I can't control you… but if you come back here and mess up the good thing he's got going on then you'll answer to me."
Blair sighed heavily and wished Nate wasn't such a drama queen. She thought he sounded way too over-protective and rather ridiculous. Chuck was a big boy and he didn't need Nate's protection. She didn't know the things Chuck had been struggling with during the months that had passed since her departure from New York. She didn't know how he had been seeking out dangers and putting himself in harm's way in the hope that physical pain would distract him from the emotional pain.
Dan knew. He had been witness to a few of these incidents and caught enough information from Nate as to understand the reasons for Chuck's reckless behavior. To Dan it was further proof that Chuck Bass was unstable and unreliable.
He arrived in Paris two days after Blair. He had visited her a few times while she was in Monaco and now that her engagement was over he sought her out in Paris. He claimed he needed refuge from the States and the reactions to his book. Few people depicted in the book had been pleased with what they read and his list of friends was growing thin at the moment. Nate still hung out with him but Dan pretty openly disliked Chuck nowadays which Nate did not appreciate. It annoyed Dan that Nate would be on Chuck's side over Dan's and he was convinced Nate simply refused to see the real Chuck. Until he did it was a subject better left untouched but it made hanging out with Nate less comfortable than it had used to be.
There was another reason why he kept running to Blair but he hadn't brought it up with her yet. He had feelings for her, but making those feelings known when she was engaged didn't seem appropriate, nor did it seem very wise to try and woo her while she was carrying another man's child.
Blair couldn't understand why Dan kept coming to see her, even if she didn't mind his visits. By now he knew that she was pregnant and he was the only one of her friends who knew. She hadn't told Serena because the two of them weren't on solid terms right now and she wasn't sure what she would say to her. But Dan being the only one who knew was about to change. To hell with Nate and his warnings, Blair had her mind set on going back to the Upper East Side and telling Chuck all about what had happened in the past six months.
When Dan heard about it he was immediately convinced it was a horrible idea. Chuck Bass could under no circumstances make for an appropriate father. Not now and perhaps not ever. Normally Dan would advocate for a father's right to know about his baby but given everything he had witnessed with Chuck in the past year he thought it would be a really bad idea for him to get involved. He advised Blair to at least wait for a little while longer. At the back of his mind he wondered if his insistence in part had to do with his own strong feelings for Blair and how it made him sick to his stomach to picture Blair cooing over a baby together with Chuck. Still he felt his concerns regarding Chuck's parental aptitude were justified and he did his best to convince Blair not to tell him.
Confused over everything Dan was saying, the things Nate had said and her own feelings Blair ended up not knowing what to do. She retreated to Harold and Roman's chateau in order to figure things out. She only had a few more months to do so and before she knew it she had no time at all. She was too pregnant to dare fly and above all she was scared of being caught by paparazzi and photographed this way. The idea of her pregnant picture becoming public before she had had a chance to talk to Chuck was frightening. And she couldn't very well call Chuck and ask him to casually stop by in France for a little chat. She would have to tell him about the baby after the child had been born. It was as far from ideal as she could possibly get but it didn't seem like there was any other choice.
In February the child arrived. A healthy baby boy. She named him Sebastian Charles Waldorf and found herself crying herself to sleep the night of his birth over the fact that there was no father there to sign the birth certificate. She had messed everything up for herself and for her newborn son. During the first five weeks she stayed with Sebastian at her father's chateau, knowing she couldn't leave her baby and travel across the Atlantic and afraid that it might be dangerous to take such a small child on such a long flight. Plus she would certainly not be able to sneak back to the Upper East Side unnoticed with a baby.
Dan Humphrey came to visit and they talked at length about the baby's lack of a father. Blair wanted to tell Chuck everything but Dan kept insisting that he would be a toxic influence on the child and that she needed to think about what was best for the baby and not for herself or Chuck. Blair protested that what was best for her son was to have a father in his life. Dan was more than willing to take on a fatherly role and claimed himself to be an apt candidate for the job. Blair rolled her eyes and asked him how Milo was doing these days.
As time went by it became increasingly difficult to go back home and tell Chuck the truth. Keeping the baby secret from him during the pregnancy was one thing, and it was bad enough in itself. Waiting for months after the baby's birth to tell him was something else entirely. She had no good reason for why she had waited. She wasn't sure he would understand. She barely understood it herself, looking back. Each day made it more difficult and before she knew it she had reached the point where it seemed impossible. Too much time had passed. She knew she had to tell him at some point but she kept postponing it, kept hiding in her secluded dream at the chateau.
And thus things had continued for three years. Sebastian was a little person now. Chuck had missed out on his entire babyhood. Blair had only made a few visits to New York; none of them had included bringing Sebastian. Her visits had only lasted a few days at a time and somehow she had managed to become uninteresting while she was away. The media could care less that the American girl who had briefly been engaged to the prince of Monaco was in town. Gossip Girl had eventually closed shop without anyone ever finding out who she was. Blair's visits slipped by unnoticed and she purposely avoided seeing her old friends. Even Serena. She knew it would be too difficult to hang out with Serena and not share her big secret but their friendship was frail now and a bomb like that would certainly destroy it for good.
This time around Blair had arrived in the city in early spring. She had only been there one night before she was contacted by a shady journalist who claimed he had information about her she wouldn't want to be made public. Blair had quickly looked up who he was online while they spoke and found that he was a journalist with quotation marks around the profession. He owned an online magazine which focused mostly on gossip, like a larger version of Gossip Girl. And he claimed to know she had a three year-old son hidden away in France and said he would post the news on his site unless she paid him to keep the information unpublished.
While his site may not exactly be the Times Blair knew that if the information got posted there it would soon spread. The possibility of a secret son to the prince of Monaco would be too juicy to let lie. It seemed to her that this journalist, Malcolm, would have much more to gain from posting the news than by blackmailing her but it was what it was. He demanded three million dollars of her, money she did not have, at least not available to simply hand out. He told her she had ten days to gather it or her secret would be out.
For the first fifteen minutes after their conversation ended Blair just stared blankly out in space, rubbing her arms. The whole thing made no sense. Why would anyone use something like this for blackmail? It was ridiculous. Why would he give her ten days to get the money? It wasn't logical. How did he even know about Sebastian to begin with? And just how much did he know? He had made no mention of the boy's paternity which led her to believe he thought the child was Louis'. That was what anyone would think, given when he had been born. Only Chuck would know there was another possible father.
Blair wasn't particularly worried how Louis would react if all this became public. He already knew everything. And she doubted that there would be much news value regarding Blair herself. There were two other things that caused her concern. One was the idea of Chuck finding out this way and drawing his own conclusions. The other was the thought of her poor boy being the focus of all that media attention. Even if Blair herself was uninteresting to the media Sebastian would be a different story. They would all assume he was a hidden prince of Monaco. He would be stuck with that label all his life and either forced to pretend to be a bastard child of their royal family forever or become the face of the scandalous idea that perhaps the prince's fiancée had not been faithful to him. Someone might even peg him to be Chuck's son. It wasn't too far a stretch of the imagination that somebody would make that guess given her history with Chuck. In addition there were probably a lot of pictures taken that night at the bar mitzvah where she and Chuck appeared together.
All that attention would be far too much for a three year-old boy. And it would color the rest of his life. He'd never be completely free of the scandal, always stuck with the labels that came with it. Blair could not have that. At the back of her mind she knew she couldn't keep him hidden away at the chateau forever but it would be different if she brought him out into the public eye in her own way. She had thought about faking his date of birth and claiming him to be a year younger than he was but mostly she figured nobody would care if she came back to New York with a child, at least not care enough to connect any dots. If the news was published online like that it would be a whole other story. Malcolm could present it any way he wanted to.
Blair got up and paced back and forth in the room. Right now she wasn't thinking mainly about the repercussions if her secret became public. Her mind was more focused on the mystery of why he would blackmail her. She stopped pacing and realized she needed to do something proactive rather than just sit in her hotel room and try to understand what was really happening. She could mull that part over later.
One thing she knew with certainty. She needed help. She couldn't handle this situation on her own. She had to have a strategy and she had to have connections. She hadn't done any real scheming in years now and she barely had any viable connections left in New York City. She needed to gather troops, people she could trust.
She needed Chuck Bass. It was a gamble, he might decide to find out what her secret was or even refuse to help her out if she didn't tell him all the details at the start. But she would have to take the chance. If she didn't get his help he would probably find everything out soon enough anyway. Chuck had a scheming mind as brilliant as his own, he thought similar to her yet different enough that they could complete each other in their plotting. He had connections, lacked scruples and loyalty had always been one of his hallmarks. She would call him first and ask for his help.
She needed Serena. The two of them had drifted apart, sure, but their ties went back too far to completely be ignored. Blair felt a strong need for her lifelong bestie to be there until they had solved this. And whatever connections Chuck lacked Serena probably had. Besides, it would be near impossible to include Chuck and not have Serena get word eventually and it would only make their friendship more frosty if that were to happen.
She needed Dorota. At least for smaller things such as getting equipment they might need or running other errands.
She needed Dan. He was the only one outside Louis and her family who knew about Sebastian and she had to have someone on board who knew the whole story. She couldn't bear the secret all on her own and he would be a useful sounding board.
She needed Nate. If she were to have both Chuck and Dan involved in the same scheme Nate would be necessary to keep the other two from try to verbally kill each other. In addition Nate had the same quality that Chuck and Serena had, the ability to take part in her schemes without judging her. She needed people around her who wouldn't judge. People around her she could trust. She had relied on Nate, Serena and Chuck for twenty years of her life and felt confident that she could rely on them through this too. And she knew that if she wasn't able to find a way around Malcolm's demands her three friends would be able to help her with the three million dollars.
She sat down on the couch and dialed the first number.
So… How was that? Does it sound interesting in the least? Let me know please! I won't update this story until I've posted the last BM3 chapter but hopefully this fic will keep at least me entertained during the fall =)